Hi. SuburbanCorrespondent here, coming out of hiding. Tell me, are they gone yet? Can someone check?
Who? Why, al
l those people clicking over from The New York Times, that’s who…those gawkers…all coming over to see the large-family show, as it were…
We just can’t let our hair down with that type around. We have to pretend to be super-organized, super-happy…or we’ll hear, “Well, you shouldn’t have had so many kids!” As if stopping at 2 children means that you won’t have any problems whatsoever…
In truth, the first 2 are the hardest, aren’t they? My husband and I refer to our 2 eldest as the prototypes - one boy, one girl, both in mortal danger of being spoiled by our over-attention to their upbringing. We read books! subscribed to magazines! took courses! It’s a wonder they have made it to almost-adulthood. The Final Four (as we call numbers 3-6) (oh my goodness, the gawkers gasp, she can’t even remember their names!) get to enjoy the benign neglect that we, as more experienced parents, are able to bestow upon them. Because, really, how hard is it to feed, clothe, and drive to dental appointments a bunch of kids? Not very…
What is hard is trying to raise them by the 2-child standard established over the past 30 years by increasingly affluent members of the American m
iddle class. Lessons! Therapy! Sports! Tutoring! The child-rearing bar has been raised to the point where only the most well-off and least reproductive parents can possibly succeed. When did having children become so professionalized and competitive?
Having a family is the natural thing to do. And having a bunch of siblings is a natural way to experience childhood. Now, I know natural is not always best - myself, I have an inordinate fondness for the luxury of indoor plumbing, say, and the ability to buy already-plucked chickens at the supermarket. But for raising human beings? The give-and-take (and take, and take) of a good-sized family is unmatched for teaching people to share, to sacrifice, to accommodate….in short, for teaching people how to grow up.
So stop gawking and join the club! It’s a lot more fun than it looks. Mostly.
When I was talking to the New York Times reporter a couple of weeks ago, we were discussing the differences between the portrayal of large families on TV now as opposed to twenty or thirty years ago. Jon and Kate plus 8, the Duggar family, other TLC shows featuring larger-than-average families in very unusual situations…love ‘em or hate ‘em, they just don’t reflect family life as the vast majority of us know it. People look at the Duggars who are having far more children than most people ever would and whose reasoning puts them firmly in a category many find totally unthinkable, and Jon & Kate who had far more babies at once than most people ever would or could, and get the idea that people have big families only as a medical anomaly or for bizarre reasons (that’s not to say, by the way, that I think having lots of kids for religious reasons is bizarre, but many people definitely do). The fact is that there are very few (perhaps zero) shows featuring larger-than-average families living normal, average family lives most of the audience can relate to (whether or not they have large families themselves).
“Where’s our Cosby show?” I asked the reporter. “Where’s our Eight is Enough?” Heck, even Family Ties, one of my childhood favorites, featured a family of four kids (by the time the youngun came around). If there’s a show out there now like that, I don’t know of it.
But then it occurred to me that it’s not just normal large-family life that’s missing from prime time these days: it’s ANY normal family life. Is there even such a thing as a family sitcom anymore? You remember, the sort you’d gather with your parents and siblings to watch at 8 PM on Thursday, the kind where your mom and dad never had to cringe or cover your eyes/ears and nobody had to clear their throats in embarrassment because the subject matter wasn’t really suited to a mixed audience? Nowadays, there are hardly any sitcoms left anyway, and what there are have been firmly relegated to one audience or the other. You’ve got your preteen/teen shows and your grownup shows. The grownup shows are usually far too mature in content for kids to watch and the preteen/teen shows are an insufferable excuse for entertainment that I’d rather nobody in my family watched, least of all my kids. Then there are the reality shows like American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that many families have begun tuning into on weekday evenings. That’s fine, if you like reality shows, but I am not a huge fan. I’d much rather have a TV family to get invested in again, to laugh with and watch go through normal family problems and issues with my kids just like my parents and siblings watched with me.
TV networks: I promise you, if you bring back the family sitcom, I will watch. Sure, it may not be as consistently good as the Cosby show (those are big shoes to fill) and it likely won’t feature a big family, but at this point, I’m not picky. Forget Family Ties, I’d even take a Growing Pains. Heck maybe even a Diff’rent Strokes. The point is, I want something relatively wholesome I can watch WITH my kids, where the point is people living their lives rather than losing weight, becoming a star, or winning a bunch of money. I want to laugh with the foibles of a normal, loveable, imperfect but completely (okay, almost completely) believable family again.
Surely I can’t be the only one?
–When Meagan Francis isn’t mourning the loss of the Huxtables and hunting for reruns on Nick at Nite, she’s blogging about life as an author with soon-to-be-five kids on her blog.